Hunt

 Feeding off my post about what our bodies expect, I thought I'd take it to another dimension. It's a total myth that since humans evolved in the seasonless equator, seasons don't matter. They do have seasons at the equator, they are just different from what we think of as seasons. As discussed in Seasonality and Human Evolution, the seasons we dealt with for most of our evolution were just two: wet and dry.

Neanderthals show physical adaptation to cold climates, but all humans have a fairly "tropical" morphology. That doesn't mean that the northern four seasons are unimportant, especially since the duality is still present and there is the possibility of smaller, but still important, genetic changes. Particularly significant is that genes for energy metabolism show climactic variation.

Either way, no matter where your ancestors came from, eating the same diet all year is probably not natural. Eating with the seasons enables you to adapt better to your environment and to reap the benefits of two types of diets. Paleo dieters already mimic the feast and famine of early life with intermittent fasting, but eating seasonally allows you to also mimic another important duality. 

Right now many of my locavore friends are complaining about the lack of food selection in this late winter season. Most of them are vegetarians or eat very little meat and are having to buy imported foods to get by. There are a few stalwarts surviving mostly on various roots and tubers, but that doesn't seem very delicious or nourishing to me.

While they eat their potato beet rutabaga pie, I'm eating luscious chicken confit, beef stew, lamb shanks with celeriac mash, and wild boar with garlic kale. Local doesn't feel forced to me anymore, it's easy and natural.

It took me a long time to get to this point. When I was raw vegan I savored bananas. melons, and salads in the dead of December. Back then, even a teensy draft set me a shivering. I was completely miserable. My diet was full of "live" foods, but I felt dead. No matter how many layers of sweaters and blankets I put on, I was freezing. A walk along the frigid harbors of Stockholm was impossible. 

This winter I have eaten ample amounts of fat and thyroid-supporting foods like seaweed. I feel perfectly warm and no longer need five gazillion wool blankets to get to sleep. The cold north wind blowing off the Hudson river doesn't faze me. I hardly feel deprived...I LOVE the food I'm eating and I feel nourished. The best thing is that I no longer crave sweet foods like I used to. I chalk it up to adequate fat. 

December used to be for peppermint ice cream, February for gallons of heart shaped candies, and in early March I started my Cadbury Cream Egg binge. Last night I passed the Cream Eggs at the store and was briefly filled with nostalgia....but then I remembered how insipid they taste and how much better my duck confit tasted. 

I hesitate to recommend TS Wiley's Lights Out: Sugar, Sleep, and Survival, because I feel it's a little lacking in scientific rigor, but it does have some important ideas. Wiley believes eating sugar in the winter keeps your body in a constant state of summer, where you need to eat as much as possible to pile on pounds for a long winter. Her prescription is to eat no sugar in the winter, but as much as you want in the summer. A similar idea may apply to omega fatty acids-: omega-3s are a summer fat and omega-6s a winter fat according to Susan Allport (hat tip to Matt Metzgar). That makes so much sense to me. The omega-3s in meat come primarily from fresh grass and animals lay down omega-6 rich fat stores for the winter. Omega-3s in large amounts can also have an immunosuppressive effect, which could be maladaptive for a long tough winter. Another area of concern that seems to be seasonal for me is the acid-base balance, which is slightly controversial, but regardless, my diet is net acid in the winter and net alkaline in the summer. 

We can't forget the obvious thing: Vitamin D from sunlight, which probably accounts for the seasonality of some of the illnesses in the aforementioned book. Vitamin D is important in the winter, but it's even more important to go outside and get some sunlight in the summer when your body is expecting it. 

Despite the richness of my diet and exercising much less in the winter, I have no gained any weight. In the summer I expect that my desire for fat will wane and I'll fully enjoy the bounty of fruit, herbs, and fish at the farmer's market. By autumn, as the days get colder, I will yearn once again for richer foods. 

My ancestors have lived in the North for a long time, perhaps this is what my body expects. Either way, eating seasonally has allowed me to feel better and to truly enjoy local food in a way I never did when I forced myself to eat low on the food chain. 

When I was a child I went to "marine biology" camp at a marine animal theme park. I remember being very enthusiastic about working with dolphins and seals. That enthusiasm was promptly crushed when I got to see the tiny concrete cages where they spent most of their lives. The were painted that garnish teal color that swimming pools tend to be painted and reeked of disinfectants. They fed them the cheapest rancid throw-away fish, a world away from their rich and diverse diets in the wild.

I thought about that when I heard about the killer whale at Sea World that drowned a trainer. Killer whales in captivity live in environments completely inappropriate for their species' evolutionary heritage. At least most zoos try to make things like in the wild, but marine parks are all about concrete. Instead of eating seals and salmon, they eat whatever fish is cheapest on the market. Instead of living in pods, they are sometimes kept alone. Of course they suffer from reduced lifespan and bizarre pathologies like dorsal fin collapse.

Author Erich Hoyt said: 

As I reported in The Performing Orca and also in some detail in Orca: The Whale Called Killer, trainers have noted that orcas start to get bored and go a bit crazy after a few years in captivity. You must imagine a highly intelligent social mammal and a big predator normally traveling 100 kms or more a day, then taken from its family, stripped of its ability to socialize normally, to hunt and to travel. What it has left is its relationship to the trainer, but how long can that really keep them interested?

Substitute a few words and that could be about Homo Sapiens. It's interesting that despite the immense power and predatory nature of killer whales, they don't prey on us in the wild. They have even been known to cooperate with humans in the hunt. The killer whales of Eden that were documented to cooperate with humans might be the tip of the iceberg in that relationship, as it might have been present in other cultures and died out before it was documented. Perhaps killer whales recognize us as kin: high intelligent seafaring top level predators.

Some of you might think "Why is a woman who has eaten whale talking about this?" Hunting is part of our evolutionary heritage and benefits us physically and emotionally. Keeping animals in concrete tanks is not. We can and should provide evolutionarily appropriate environments for both animals and humans. It benefits the health of all involved.

If Sea World provided larger more natural tanks for its animals and a diet of penguins, seals, shark livers, whale tongues, and other nutritious traditional orca foods...I might go there, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon. 

With most big proponents of the paleo diet being male and the general taboo against this subject, it's not surprising that menstruation and the paleo diet is little discussed. That's a shame, because the beneficial effects of the paleo diet on menstruation is one of the main reasons I keep to the diet. 

In most of the modern world, getting your period is a pain. It can last as long as a week and be accompanied by all manners of maladies ranging from irritability to stomach upset. Young women are getting their period earlier and earlier, at the ages of 11 and 12. This has been tied to disease later in life.

It's hard to know what menstruation was like in the paleolithic, but the modern hunter-gatherers studied provide some insight. Foragers, and most women in the rest of the world, get their period around 16. That makes sense because if women started earlier it might make for risky pregnancies. In Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, menstruation is described as a "thing of no account." It's the conventional narrative that menstruation would have been rare for hunter-gatherers, but this is not true. It would have been less because of breast feeding and pregnancy, but still part of the female experience.

This excellent article about that myth talks about how sometimes !Kung women will have periods but will have not released an egg. It also talks about the myth that exercise causes amenorrhea

I learned, by studying runners, what is true for all women - ovulation and menstruation are not the same. Regular periods can and do occur with no ovulation or with disturbed ovulation[8,13,14]. However, like most doctors (and consequently, ordinary women), Is Menstruation Obsolete? implies that periods mean ovulation. It also infers that amenorrhea is (just) anovulation. In fact, amenorrhea means both estrogen and progesterone levels are low-a situation that always causes fast bone loss and the risk for osteoporosis.

 

She contrasts low fertility caused by living an active and natural life, with the Western illness of amenorrhea, which seems to be unrelated to those things. 

My own experience is that prior to starting the paleo diet, I had very heavy periods lasting as long as a week and accompanied by irritability, stomach sickness, and headaches. After I had been on the paleo diet for awhile, my periods became shorter, lighter, and easier. The times I have gone off the paleo diet and had bad periods again have been a huge incentive to stick with the diet. 

Why are my periods so much better now? Well, the ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 has been linked to PMS. The reduction in body fat also probably decreased the length of my period. 

The problems with modern periods can be linked to various modern habits from contraceptive pills to environmental toxins to delayed childbirth. However, it's clear that appropriate nutrition plays a role. 

Edit:

Some women have reported amenorrhea on the paleo diet. The causes of amenorrhea seem to be varied and some are serious, so a visit to a doctor might be in order. 

I've been reading the Continuum Concept lately and that, plus the comments I got, have led me to revise the graphic for the Faileo diet post

Mmm fatty fat flavored fatty fat

The earlier graphic was a pyramid, which many mistook for a dietary recommendation graph like the USDA's' idiotic food pyramid. I feel this graphic illustrates the philosophy behind my thoughts better. Plus it adds on a new concept, which is thinking about diet in terms of the human continuum. Just like the babies in The Continuum Concept biologically expect to be held, our bodies biologically expect certain food. When we consume things like soybean oil our bodies just don't function properly, just like babies that are never held as infants. Of course there is variance based on genetics, gut bacteria, etc, but overall animal fat is the nutrient that the human body seems to be evolved to eat.

Animal fat is the nutrient our bodies can handle most perfectly. We absorb it and utilize it in a way that fuels us without dragging us down. Contrast that with a dinner of just some chicken breast and some spinach. It's a meal that's "paleo", but unlike anything our ancient human would have encountered in a thriving environment. It takes energy to digest all that protein and fiber. Add a chicken thigh with a bunch of skin and things are looking a lot better in terms of actually fueling us.

Not on the human evolutionary continuum: too much omega-6, too much fructose, too many antinutrients, too few nutrients

Butter and ghee might get to jump the continuum...after all, they are very close to being like lard, tallow, and the other animal fats. But they have their detractors.

Another interesting thing about the analogy is that The Continuum Concept maintains that the consequences of not raising children the way humans evolved to be raised aren't just horrifying things like reactive attachment disorder, but annoying behaviors we very as normal in modern children. It's the same for not eating the way humans evolved to eat. Heart disease and diabetes are the tip of the iceberg. Health problems that probably aren't normal for humans include things we view as nuisances like acne, constipation, cold sores, and a whole host of other "small" things.